The Women’s Tax Resistance League

The Tax Resistance Movement in Great Britain

(from W.F.L. Literature Department, 1s.; post free, 1s. 1d.)

Not long ago, at the final meeting of the Women’s Tax Resistance League, it
was decided to present the famous John
Hampden Banner (which did such magnificent service at so many women’s
protest meetings against the Government’s unconstitutional practice of
taxation without representation), to the Women’s Freedom League. We treasure
this standard of former days, and now we are the grateful recipients of an
edition of “The Tax Resistance Movement in Great Britain,” written by our old
friend, Mrs. [Margaret] Kineton Parkes, with an introduction by another of our
friends, Mr. Laurence Housman.

This little book is charmingly produced, and on its outside cover appear a
figure of Britannia and the colours of the Women’s Tax Resistance League.
Every reader of The Vote knows that it was the
Women’s Freedom League which first organised tax resistance in
the year 1909 as a protest against women’s
political disenfranchisement, and all our readers should be in possession of
a copy of this book, which gives a history of the movement, tracing it back
to 1870, when two sisters, the Misses [Anna
Maria & Mary] Priestman, had their dining-room chairs taken to the
sale-room, because, being voteless, they objected to taxes being levied upon
them. Dr. Octavia Lewin is
mentioned as the first woman to resist the payment of licenses. It is
refreshing to renew our recollections of the tax resistance protests made by
Mrs. [Charlotte] Despard, Mr. [Mark] Wilks (who was imprisoned in Brixton
Gaol for a fortnight), Miss [Clemence] Housman (who was kept in Holloway
Prison for a week), Mrs. [Isabella] Darent Harrison, Mrs. [Kate] Harvey (who
had a term of imprisonment), Miss [Kate] Raliegh, Mrs. [Anne] Cobden
Saunderson, Dr. [Winifred]
Patch, Miss [Bertha] Brewster,
Dr. [Elizabeth] Knight (who
was also imprisoned), Mrs. [Mary] Sargent Florence, Miss Gertrude Eaton, and
a host of others too numerous to mention, and last, but not least, Miss
Evelyn Sharp, who, as Mrs. Parkes says, “has the distinction of being the
last tax resister to suffer persecution at the hands of unrepresentative
government in the women’s long struggle for citizenship.” The full list of
tax-resisters appearing at the end of this pamphlet will be found to be of
special interest to all suffragists.

I haven’t yet found a copy of this book on-line or available via interlibrary
loan. I might be able to order photocopies of a microfilm version held by a
library in Australia, but I’m too cheap and so I’m holding out for a better
option. Any ideas?

Another source I’ve had trouble tracking down is Laurence Housman’s
The Duty of Tax Resistance, which comes from the
same campaign. The Vote printed excerpts from it
in their 27 June 1913 issue:

The Duty of Tax Resistance

By Laurence Housman.

Two years ago Members of Parliament determined to place the payment of
themselves in front of the enfranchisement of women; and now women of
enfranchised spirit are more determined than ever to place their refusal to
pay taxes before Members of Parliament. To withdraw so moral an object-lesson
in the face of so shabby an act of political opportunism would be not merely
a sign of weakness, but a dereliction of duty.

Nothing can be worse for the moral well-being of the State than for unjust
conditions to secure to themselves an appearance of agreement and submission
which are only due to a Government which makes justice its first duty. It is
bad for the State that the Government should be able to collect with ease
taxes unconstitutionally levied; it is bad for the men of this country who
hold political power, and in whose hands it lies to advance or delay measures
of reform, that they should see women yielding an easy consent to taxation so
unjustly conditioned. If women do so, they give a certain colour to the
contention that they have not yet reached that stage of political education
which made our forefathers resist, even to the point of revolt, any system of
taxation which was accompanied by a denial of representation. It was
inflexible determination on this point which secured for the people of this
country their constitutional liberties; and in the furtherance of great
causes, history has a way of repeating itself. Our surest stand-by to-day is
still that which made the advance of liberty sure in the past.

In this country representative government has superseded all earlier forms
of feudal service, or Divine right, or the claim of the few to govern the
many; and its great strength lies in the fact that by granting to so large a
part of the community a voice in the affairs of government, it secures from
people of all sorts and conditions the maximum of consent to the laws and to
administration; and, as a consequence, it is enabled to carry on its work of
administration in all departments more economically and efficiently than
would be possible under a more arbitrary form of Government.

But though it has thus acquired strength, it has, by so basing itself,
entirely changed the ground upon which a Government makes its moral claim to
obedience. Representative government is a contract which requires for its
fulfilment the grant of representation in return for the right to tax. No
principle for the claim to obedience can be laid down where a Government,
claiming to be representative, is denying a persistent and active demand for
representation. People of a certain temperament may regard submission to
unjust Government as preferable to revolt, and “peaceful penetration” as the
more comfortable policy; but they cannot state it as a principle which will
bear examination; they can give it no higher standing than mere opportunism.

It may be said that the general welfare of the State over-rides all private
claims. That is true. But under representative government it is impossible to
secure the general welfare or a clean bill of health where, to any large body
of the community which asks for it, full citizenship is being denied. You
cannot produce the instinct for self-government among a community and then
deny it expresion, without causing blood-poisoning to the body politic. It
is against nature for those who are fit for self-government to offer a
submission which comes suitably only from the unfit; nor must you expect
those who are pressing for freedom to put on the livery of slaves, and
accept that ill-fitting and ready-made costume as though it were a thing of
their own choice and made to their own order and taste.

Representative Government man, without much hurt to itself, acquiesce in the
exclusion from full citizenship of a sleeping, but not of an awakened section
of the community. And if it so acts toward the latter, it is the bounden duty
of those who are awake to the State’s interests to prevent an
unrepresentative Government from treating them, even for one single day, as
though they were asleep. They must, in some form or another, force the
Government to see that by its denial of this fundamental claim to
representation its own moral claim to obedience has disappeared.

That is where the great distinction lies between the unenfranchised condition
of certain men in the community who have still not got the vote and the
disenfranchised position of women. It is all the vast difference between the
conditional and the absolute. To no man is the vote denied; it is open to him
under certain conditions which, with a modicum of industry and sobriety,
practically every man in this country can fulfil. To woman the vote is denied
under all conditions whatsoever. The bar has been raised against her by
statute, and by statute and legal decision is still maintained. There is the
woman’s direct and logical answer to those who say that, after all, she is
only upon the same footing as the man who, without a vote, has still to pay
the tax upon his beer and his tobacco. The man is always a potential voter;
and it is mainly through his own indifference that he does not qualify; but
the woman is by definite laws placed outside the Constitution of those three
estates of the realm from which the sanction of Government is derived. If it
asks no sanction of her, why should she give it? From what principle in its
Constitution does it deduce this right at once to exclude and to compel? We
see clearly enough that it derives its right of rule over men from the
consent they give it as citizens — a consent on which its legislative
existence is made to depend. But just as expressly as the man’s consent is
included in our Constitution, the woman’s is excluded.

From that exclusion the State suffers injury every day; and submission to
that exclusion perpetuates injury, not to the State alone, but to the minds
of the men and of the women who together should form its consenting voice as
one whole. This submission is, therefore, an evil; and we need in every town
and village of this country some conspicuous sign that among women submission
has ceased. What more definite, what more logical sign can be given than for
unrepresented women to refuse to pay taxes?

If Women Suffragists are fully awake to their responsibilities for the
enforcement of right citizenship, they will not hesitate to bring into
disrepute an evil and usurping form of Government which does not make the
recognition of woman’s claim its first duty. The Cæsar to whom in this
country we owe tribute is representative government. Unrepresentative
government is but a forgery on Cæsar’s name. For Suffragists to honour such a
Government, so lacking to them in moral sanction, is to do dishonour to
themselves; and to offer it any appearance of willing service is to do that
which in their hearts they know to be false.

Find Out More!

For more information on the topic or topics below (organized as “topic →
subtopic →
sub-subtopic”), click on any of the ♦ symbols to see other pages on this site that cover the topic. Or browse the site’s topic index at the “Outline” page.